Switzerland 1

Listen to Switzerland 1, a 22-year-old man from Basel, Switzerland. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

Both as a courtesy and to comply with copyright law, please remember to credit IDEA for direct or indirect use of samples.  IDEA is a free resource;  please consider supporting us.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 22

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

PLACE OF BIRTH: Basel, Switzerland

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian/Swiss/Italian

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: When recorded, subject was a studying sociology at university.

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject was on exchange in the United States for one year at the time of this recording and had made a number of previous holiday trips to the States.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

He speaks German, French, Italian and English, but his native tongue is German. He lives in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Campbell Wharton

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I was born, eh, in Basel in Switzerland and, ah, I was raised there and I went to school there [laughs], and my father is from Italy, and so I spend a lot of time every year in Italy, during summer especially. Um, my native language is actually German. I talk German to my mother, and my second language is Italian. I usually talk Italian to my father and, ah, then in school in Switzerland you have to learn French. Yeah, Basel is, ah, on the Rhine, of course, and it’s, ah, in a basin there, and we live actually in a suburb which is outside and its in kind of a valley, there’s a valleys around Basel, and it’s kind of hilly and there are trees and stuff [laughs], forests and yeah, everything’s pretty neat and tiny and close. So, where I live I went to school, ah, elementary school, and then high school and the university’s in the city, so I go to university by bus each day. I have relatives in Detroit, and so from time to time I visit them, and to be honest I like better speaking English to them rather than Italian. I mean they’re Italians that migrated to the U.S, but their Italian is kind of strange, you know, the American accent and so I like talking English to them. I think it’s easier for them too, actually. I like the U.S., actually, really it’s, ah, kind of big, you know, compared to Switzerland, might be and it’s more spacious and it’s really diverse actually, population, you know, all the different ethnicities and, ah, races and cultures and also diverse in terms of landscape. You got basically everything in the U.S. from tropical or sub-tropical to [laughs] to polar regions. That’s what I like. I like, ah, California the best in the U.S actually [laughs; no it’s true; um, I just like the lifestyle there. The climate and it’s, ah, [laughs] all the diverse people, which is I think special even in the U.S. The East Coast is pretty much like Europe, I would say, even there are some differences of course. I mean these cultures are pretty close, I would say, it’s not that big difference from Europe to the U.S. There are some differences. I would say people are more open in the U.S, they’re more direct. They, they say what they think and what they want. In Europe, it’s probably more, you’re more on polite side and you don’t come up with certain topics. For example, here in the U.S., it’s pretty common in your first meeting that you talk about your profession, what you do for a living and in Europe, especially in northern Europe, it’s you don’t ask that people what’s their job in the first conversation, actually, that’s for example, a difference.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Campbell Wharton

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 03/12/2000

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: 

Most of the Swiss subjects on IDEA come from Basel, which is in northern Switzerland, where the Swiss, German, and French borders meet. Its main language is German. For more information on the city, see Wikipedia.

COMMENTARY BY: Cameron Meier

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 08/01/2014

The archive provides:

• Recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select.
• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

 

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.